Stardock Drinks Crazy Juice
We received word from Stardock that they’ve decided to something a little… unconventional. According to a poll posted on their forums, Stardock has decided to leave it up to their fans to decide when the next expansion pack for GalCiv2, Twilight of the Arnor.
Advantages of coming out in December:
* You get it sooner
* It can be purchased as a Christmas gift for other people
* Stardock gets prestige for releasing two good expansion packs in a single year
Advantages of coming out in January:
* More time for the public beta of the expansion pack.
* Brad (me) can spend more time enhancing the computer AI before release.
* More time to get preview coverage.
So you tell us. We can go either way. There is a web poll on the left side of the main page of GalCiv2.com. Vote there and post here and we’ll go with the majority.
My vote is for January. There’s already a ton of must-buy titles for the holidays, and people can use the holiday money they got from grandma to buy this in January.
That being said, I find this to be an interesting way of including the fans in the development process, though not entirely new for Stardock. I remember when GalCiv2 as first being released, and Stardock polled their community members about including multiplayer, and the majority of people said they didn’t want multiplayer (and rightly so). Instead, Stardock was able to focus on releasing a fantastic single-player experience without having to divert efforts to the doldrums of turn-based multiplayer strategy gaming.
Oh, and Stardock doesn’t rape your hard drive with half-arsed copy protection. Bonus.
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Stardock is famous for putting no copy protection on this game, and their level of fan trust and inclusion is pretty impressive.
I mean, this is the second EXPANSION! The kind of sales numbers they need for this to work means guess what, making it easier for paying customers to play your game is…dingdingding!… worth it!